Throughout the tumultuous conference, I watched [Shostakovich's] hands twist the cardboard tips of his cigarettes, his face twitch and his whole posture express intense unease. While his Soviet colleagues on the right and left looked calm and as self-contained as mantelpiece Buddhas, his sensitive face looked disturbed, hurt and terribly shy … He seemed like a trapped man, whose only wish was to be left alone, to the peace of his own art and to the tragic destiny to which he, like most of his countryman, had been forced to resign himself.

Nabokov on the 1949 Cultural and Scientific for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Shostakovich had been commanded to go by Stalin.